2020 election

Everyone knew some husky chap in college who smelled like onions and called himself a libertarian. He may or may not have worn a fedora. He wasn’t cool enough to do drugs but he figured that, if he never stopped talking about how much he wanted to legalize them, he’d get a bit of second-hand cool. This fellow was never seen without a copy of The Road to Serfdom tucked beneath his sweaty armpit. He never missed a seminar (again, lame) and would say the name of Ayn Rand out loud at least once per class. Sometimes he wouldn’t even raise his hand first; he’d just whisper it lovingly under his breath.

To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America's democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what. First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent.

The triumphant ululations of the almost unanimous Trump-hating media of America and much of the world did not clarify the late election. An unknowable quantity of harvested ballots came from the mass unsolicited mailing to the wildly inaccurate voters’ listings in Democratic-governed swing states, following a plan the Democrats implemented in hundreds of state lawsuits over three years and then hid under the pandemic terror that their allies in the media propagated. This produced miraculous Democratic comebacks from ‘ballot drops’ in the middle of the night after counting had been paused in several selected states, and it quickly became almost impossible to verify these ballots, mixed in with many millions of others.

It started a few weeks before Election Day. With the polling data almost universally showing that Joe Biden would win the White House and a ‘blue wave’ would sweep Mitch McConnell into the Senate minority, creatures of the Washington swamp started becoming emboldened enough to publicly buck Donald Trump and his team. I don’t mean, of course, the NeverTrumpers who opposed Trump during the primary and general elections in 2016. Those ‘brave’ souls assumed Trump wasn’t going to beat Hillary Clinton so spoke out against him with incredibly judgmental letters and tweets by the dozens, telling voters Trump was unworthy of the presidency, as if Bill Clinton never happened.

President Trump said Monday in a tweet that his administration is willing to start the formal transition of power to Joe Biden, even while asserting that he still intends to 'fight' and 'prevail' in his legal challenges against the results of the presidential election. 'I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Country. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused — and I do not want to see this happen to her, her family, or employees of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.

So much for the Powell doctrine. Only a few days ago President Trump deemed Sidney Powell a vital part of his ‘elite strike force’. No longer. Now Rudy Giuliani’s cold statement dismissing Sidney Powell, who has been the attorney for Michael Flynn, from the Trump legal team is arousing much merriment but I don’t share it. If you can’t peddle a good conspiracy theory from within the confines of the Trump camp, then things have come to a pretty pass indeed. All that will be left for Powell is to fold her termination into a larger conspiracy. Dominion, she will likely claim, has dominion over the Trump campaign itself.

The 2020 election has provided fertile ground upon which Republicans can spend the next four years doing to Joe Biden what the Democrats did to Donald Trump and George W. Bush. For four years, Democrats and their media allies trumpeted every claim, no matter how baseless or crazy, that Trump’s 2016 election win was illegitimate and fraudulent. Despite zero evidence that so much as a single vote was interfered with, Democrats peddled the hoax that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to elect Trump. Even after the Mueller investigation exonerated Trump and his campaign from the collusion canard, Democrats, led by the shameless Adam Schiff, continued to allege collusion. Their simple goal was to undermine and delegitimize the Trump presidency.

It’s of course premature to even speculate as to how the new administration will fashion a foreign policy. But enough declarations have been made to give an outline, so let us imagine the policies that might emerge.The Founders never really envisioned foreign relations being a major preoccupation of America when they drew up the US Constitution. ‘Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none,’ Thomas Jefferson famously admonished. In a document that brilliantly balances the government’s power and reach between executive, legislative and judicial branches, the executive is left with virtual control over making foreign policy, for little of that was expected.

Control of the Senate is going to come down to two January 5 runoffs in Georgia. Sen. David Perdue came a hair’s breadth from winning his race against Jon Ossoff outright, but ultimately fell just short of 50 percent plus one. Sen. Kelly Loeffler will face off against the Rev. Raphael Warnock to complete the term of former Sen. Johnny Isakson (the reward for the winner is running again in two years for the full term). Somewhat surprisingly, articles discussing these races have framed the races to claim that Republicans are favored in both. Politico declares that Democrats begin behind the eight ball, while other pieces casually cast Republicans as 'likely' or 'probable' victors in the Peach State. I’m not sure that is correct.

Democratic joy at defeating Donald Trump was partially dulled by the simultaneous diminishment of the party’s House majority. As of Sunday at least 11 Democratic-held House seats have been lost to Republicans (while Democrats have flipped three others). That’s the biggest net loss in a presidential election year by the winning presidential candidate’s party in 60 years. The unexpected divergence in the two results sparked a round of reciprocal recriminations between the House Democratic caucus’ moderate and left-wing factions. Moderates blamed the 'defund the police' sloganeering and 'socialist' branding from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her supporters, which Republicans deployed in swing district attack ads.